Bringing the Tasmanian Tiger back to life

In 1933, the last known wild Tasmanian Tiger was captured. It's death three years later was after only 100 years of human settlement (Pic: Tasmanian Parks and Wildlife).

The Australian Museum reports they have recovered DNA from an extinct animal that is good enough to clone.

The DNA from a Tasmanian Tiger (thylacine) was obtained from a pup which was caught and preserved in about 1866. The pup was preserved in alcohol, rather than formalin which destroys genetic makeup.

"While there are similar extinct animal cloning projects elsewhere in the world, the Australian Museum's project is the first to find good quality DNA," said Museum Director Professor Mike Archer.

A team headed by Dr Don Coglan, of the Evolutional Biology Unit at the Museum, has been working to recover DNA from Museum specimens for the last five months.

"The DNA we have extracted is of high quality. The preparation has enough DNA for us to be confident it contains multiple copies of nearly every Tasmanian Tiger gene," said Dr Coglan.

"These exciting results are the first major step to our ultimate goal of bringing the extinct Tasmanian Tiger back to life," said Professor Archer. "Our next step in this cutting-edge research is the construction of a DNA library which will preseve the Tasmanian Tiger genes for ever."

The research was supported by a $20,000 donation from the NSW Government. Pending further funding, the Museum hopes to draw on genetic research expertise of the Garvan Institute.

DoubtsEvolutionary biologist Dr Steve Cooper of the South Australian Museum, comments that it would be unlikely that the researchers would be able to use the same techniques as the creators of Dolly.

"You can purify DNA from old museum specimens, but it is usually fragmented. It's difficult to assemble the pieces in the right order," he said. "There are no techniques available at the moment that would enable an entire genome to be constructed from short pieces of DNA."

"One future possibility is the "Jurassic Park" technique of identifying the essential differences between the host chromosome DNA and the thylacine and then just replace these sections with the thylacine DNA," he speculated, "but this is currently the stuff of science fiction."